During the waning days of the Cold War and the dawning of the internet, computer hacker Raven has been selling high technology secrets to the Soviet Union and eluding capture by the FBI. Recently expelled college student Mev Hayes unexpectedly lands a position at a top lab at MIT where she’s encouraged to continue her controversial computer research. But when the search for Raven points her way, Mev finds that opportunity comes at a cost in a struggle for technological dominance.
During the waning days of the Cold War and the dawning of the internet, computer hacker Raven has been selling high technology secrets to the Soviet Union and eluding capture by the FBI. Recently expelled college student Mev Hayes unexpectedly lands a position at a top lab at MIT where she’s encouraged to continue her controversial computer research. But when the search for Raven points her way, Mev finds that opportunity comes at a cost in a struggle for technological dominance.
Mev Hayes hadn’t pictured the promised land as a sallow brick office building surrounded by sooty January snow piles, yet here it was in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT Building 38. The Fairchild Building. Home of the Advanced Concepts Lab. And her salvation.
She’d driven two days to get here, her first time outside Maryville, Missouri. Born there, thrived there, shamed there, stuck there.
Then she got the call.
And got the hell out.
Despite that urgency, she was later than she’d expected, and the afternoon light was already coming down under a low sky. Snow, traffic, and her desire to avoid any encounters with police all conspired to slow her down. She was supposed to meet with her new boss at noon today, a few days before the start of the semester. Now, it was almost 3:30.
Shitty first impression, Mev.
Her anxiety increased as she searched in vain for a parking spot, finally finding a tiny metered one on the left-hand side of the street that she fit into after several attempts. She ended up parking too close to the filthy snowbank and had to shimmy out. Sorting through the change at the bottom of her bag, she found enough for two hours, the maximum the meter allowed. She’d have to remember to come back and refill it. One more thing to worry about.
She was uncertain of her exact destination, and anxiously searched for building numbers on Vassar Street. She felt like an idiot, gawking at the buildings to determine her destination. But between looking foolish and being even more late, it seemed like a good trade-off.
Inside, she stomped the snow off her boots onto an already soaked mat and searched the directory for her destination. She took advantage of the long walk to the lab on the other side of the building to extract herself from her winter coat and smooth her hair and blouse. With a deep breath, she opened the door.
And walked into Oz.
Spread about the lab was the most diverse collection of computers she’d ever seen anyplace except Byte magazine. An array of desktop and minicomputers filled the room, some she didn’t even recognize, many she did: the sleek new Sun Microsystems workstations, Digital Equipment MicroVAX systems, putty-colored IBM AT PCs, a few newer IBM PS/2 PCs, Compaq PC clones, Commodore Amigas, even three cute Apple Macintosh IIs on a table in the corner. The drone of all the cooling fans was a constant low level hum, vibrating through the room. And anything that could be networked together was, with a web of Ethernet and Token Ring network cables covering the floor. She shook her head, amazed.
Not that she hadn’t benefited from a wired-up campus before. Northwest Missouri State University was an early “electronic campus,” with many classrooms connected and Vax terminals in every dorm room. Not that she’d been able to enjoy that. She’d lived at home.
At the far end of the room, a knot of people huddled in front of the largest computer monitor she’d ever seen. It had to be almost forty inches diagonal, and probably weighed a couple hundred pounds. When a few of the folks noticed her, a man in a midnight blue three- piece suit rose and walked toward her, discreetly checking his watch, then extending his tanned hand in greeting. She tried not to let it rattle her.
“You must be Mev. Randy FitzRoy. I can’t wait for you to get started with us.”
“Thank you so, so much, Dr. FitzRoy,” Mev replied, her voice meeker than she’d intended.
“Oh, please, Mev, call me Fitz. All my friends do,” he said with an inviting smile.
He was tall and fit, with a ruddy complexion as if he’d just been skiing, and floppy blond curls framing his face. “Fitz” was an absolute celebrity within the computer science community for the work coming out of his Advanced Concepts Lab at MIT. This lab.
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, IEEE, had called him “a guiding light in computing innovation, leading us into the twenty-first century.”
And she was about to join his lab.
“Everyone, this is Mev.” The crowd around the monitor watched her quietly.
“Mev came to my attention recently as someone who could both benefit our team and benefit from it. I’ve convinced her to transfer from Northwest Missouri State to MIT to finish the few hours left on her undergraduate degree, then she can enter the graduate program with all of you while she continues to refine her research.”
That version of the story sounded far, far better than the actual one. A week earlier she had been taking extra shifts at the Maryville Kmart, still in shock after being expelled from Northwest Missouri State. She’d left under a cloud, without a degree, figuring she was done with college, or at least it was done with her. Late one evening, after a double shift, she’d come home to find a note from her mom on the kitchen table, the only way she was communicating with Mev since she had “brought even more shame to the family.”
All it said was to call a guy about school. The number was for the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. The caller? A Dr. Randall FitzRoy, III, Director of the Advanced Concepts Lab.
“I heard about your dismissal from Missouri State,” he’d said on the phone that evening. “A travesty that they would let such talent go. Come to MIT. In my lab we cherish unorthodox thinkers.”
Her very next call was to Kmart to quit. She packed her car that night, left a goodbye note for her mom the next morning, and hit the road.
Fitz pulled out a chair for Mev and, once she was seated, retook his own. He turned to a Latino guy in a preppy pink polo shirt and khakis sitting at a keyboard in front of the enormous monitor.
“Hector, please proceed.”
Hector started a code walk-through, outlining what his program did and how it worked. He’d gotten only a few sentences in before Fitz interrupted him.
“Good God, Hector! After the whole Morris Worm debacle, you can’t possibly expect me to approve research on computer viruses.”
Mev knew well the furor Fitz was talking about. A little more than a year earlier, in November 1988, a Cornell student named Robert Tappan Morris released a computer worm, accidentally taking down 10% of the machines connected to the internet. Morris said it was just a test to prove he could make a self-replicating program, but it multiplied unexpectedly, bringing servers all over the world to their knees. And now he was back in the news as the first person indicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986.
“It’s not a virus, it’s a self-replicating . . .” Hector tried to object.
Fitz talked over him. “It’s ignorant and irresponsible, that’s what it is. Your final proposal for your dissertation research was due back in the fall. I give you extra time, and this is what you come up with?”
Hector paled. He looked as if he wanted to retort, to defend his choice. Instead, his shoulders slumped. “What now?” he asked, not to anyone in particular.
“See me tomorrow during office hours. We’re done here.”
Another awkward silence fell as everyone watched Hector pack and leave the office, dismissed in shame. Mev’s own face flushed in sympathy. She knew precisely how he was feeling.
The team broke up and Dr. FitzRoy turned to her; his anger with Hector evaporated as if he’d flipped a switch.
“Did you drive in today? You must be exhausted. Do you have a place yet?”
The answer to that was a definite no. She’d tried to arrange some- thing over the phone, but Campus Housing said they couldn’t help her on such short notice. She figured she’d grab a cheap hotel room and find a place over the next few days.
“Not yet,” she said.
“Check The Phoenix,” one of the other students shouted from behind a cubicle wall. “Free newspaper. Stacks everywhere. People advertise for room shares.”
Mev cringed at the intrusion into her personal affairs, then took a deep breath and tried to let it go. That was a remnant of her old life, of her old fears. This was a completely new start.
“Take the rest of the day to get yourself settled,” Fitz said. “I have great plans for us.”
# # #
Raven is an exciting undercover look at what was happening in the early stages of the computer revolution and the initial internet development era. It was a time when the budding world wide web technology was being discovered for both the advancement of human capabilities and a as a powerful, dark tool for criminal commercial and political espionage.
The story follows Mev, a disgraced college student who miraculously discovers a path onto the prestigious MIT campus where she is inexplicably taken under the wing of Dr. Randy "Fitz" Fitzroy, the celebrated head of the MIT's Advanced Concepts Lab. As part of her studies she planned to do her thesis on a program she had created, called "Demon", which cataloged all the known vulnerabilities of operating systems on a target network - basically known as "hacking".
But suddenly her relationship with her benefactor Fitz began to unravel. Tricking her into using her phenomenal skills to break into a major commercial computing company's network, she quickly became a victim to his extortion-a long planned out scheme to entice a naive and vulnerable student with her skills into the theft of industrial secrets and treasonous espionage he was deeply involved in. Soon embroiled in his plot she was learning he wasn't the kind mentor he had passed himself off as at first.
Meanwhile Paul, a discredited FBI agent, demoted to Boston to work in the new computer crimes division (still in its infancy and definitely not a premier assignment), was floundering in this field he had no clue about. He'd be forced into getting a quick, bewildering education in the use of computers in crime; and along with his younger and more computer aware partner, Carl, would now find himself a player in the bizarre world of young, computer hackers-chasing a mysterious underground leader in the movement, Raven.
Meanwhile, Mev moves in with a couple of other MIT students also involved deeply in questionable computer activities. It isn't long until all of them are stumbling through the maze of Mev's disastrous cascade of problems.
Raven is well written, moves quickly, and sometimes even frenetically, with characters that are believable and richly textured. The plot, while straight forward, has many complicated twists that make it an engaging and exciting read.
For those who enjoy authors like Joseph Menn, Dan Brown and Bruce Sterling, Raven is sure to be a big hit!